Review: Carnal meets spiritual in Nitsch exhibition

PATRICIA C. JOHNSON, Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Published 5:30 am, Saturday, April 23, 2005

Blood and guts, angst and expiation, throb together in Hermann Nitsch's The Orgies Mysteries Theater. Regardless of how one tries to phrase his installation at the Station in conceptual terms or couch it in philosophical phrases, this is visceral art, and unflinchingly honest.

Nitsch grabs you by the throat, squeezes your heart and doesn't let go. On his monumental, abstract canvases, heavily impastoed paint in shades of blood, black and gold are mashed onto the surface. Videotaped performances involve the sacrifice and evisceration of slaughterhouse animals as human stand-ins. The imagery is simultaneously revolting and hypnotic.

Nitsch, born in Vienna, Austria, in 1938, was a leader of the group called Viennese Actionism that emerged in 1961 and became notorious for its work's brutal content.

Writes Nitsch: "Without knowing Antonin Artaud's works, I interpreted his 'theater of cruelty' quite literally. Cruelty not aimed at hurting or tormenting someone, but one acted out in the theater to make people wake up and to counter pseudo-existence with intensity, propelling them towards what is essential to life."

Nitsch's Theater, conceived in 1957, is part medieval Passion play and part salvation ritual. Abstract theology, Christian or otherwise, can go only so far, but drama engages eye and ear. This Theater is as graphic as a CSI episode on television.

More significantly, it's mystical like a Bach fugue.

Its independent but interrelated parts include mural-size paintings; cases filled with medical instruments; liturgical and symbolic objects meticulously placed on tables; and videos and photographs of performances.

The paintings are large, bold, and dominate the space. The multipart paintings stand alone but are installed side by side, floor to ceiling, so that impenetrable walls of thick, juicy paint envelop the viewer. Their format is uniform — a rectangle with a simple garment centered and stretched open-armed at the top edge. Animal blood and thick oil paint are mashed and smeared on the canvas with aggressive gesture.

Most of the paintings are in shades of red, tomato to wine — the color of suffering.

One that is black — the color of death — consists of nine panels, arranged in three rows of three. The bottom row is angled from the wall to the floor, an invitation to enter the realm; it feels luminous in spite of its carbonized appearance.

Two groupings are a gloriously vibrant yellow: a symbol of divinity, the color of resurrection and a calming place to soothe the eyes.

Vestments and monstrances are carefully placed on tables in front of the paintings, like altars before the crucifix. Unwrapped packets of white tissues and sugar cubes, aligned on flat trays, allude to purity and spiritual sweetness; they also are stand-ins for the tastes and textures of the performances.

The videos and photographs concern sacrifice and bloodletting, matters integral to nearly every world religion. They are rituals understood both as physical expressions of devotion or penance, and as metaphors of transcendence. They are central to Nitsch's performances, which last as long as six days, involve all the senses and include numerous participants in what sometimes appears to be a Dionysian rather than spiritual celebration. The documentary images are graphic, but Nitsch makes clear that the animals "sacrificed" in his drama were already headed for the slaughterhouse and were humanely killed. They are consumed at the conclusion of the performance in a sacramental act that is also as old as humankind.

The powerful symbolism and vivid imagery of Nitsch's Theater will make many flinch. But as the drama strips away the sanitized view of our world, it lays bare the primal need for communion with something bigger than ourselves.